On the thousandth year of the calendar, 18th of July, when the fifth bell of Ashguard tolled for evening prayers, the Herrington palace held its breath.
Heat clung to stone. Lamps hissed. Midwives moved in quick, practiced arcs—boil, fold, catch, breathe. Duke Marcus Herrington stood in the doorway with his sword-belt forgotten on a chair. Claire Herrington, Healer of the River Wards, rode the breaking wave and brought forth a daughter.
She did not cry.
"Clear the mouth," Claire said, voice steady and laced with the confidence of an experienced healer even in the midst of labor. "Rub the feet. Hard."
The women obeyed; one pressed two fingers to the tiny sternum. A small shake of the head traveled the room. Marcus did not ask. He knew.
Before grief could fully arrive, another pain rose across Claire's spine. The second child came quick, fierce—red-faced and outraged at the cold. His first cry changed the temperature of the air, a quiet warmth rolling through skin and lamp-smoke and stone.
Across the room, the still girl's chest rose once. The breath faded like a spark in wind.
Claire, experienced with the loss of newborns in labor bent her brow to her daughter's and whispered, "Thank you. For that moment."
Constitution increased slightly — your breath steadies; the cold stings less.
The sentence did not sound so much as arrive. No numbers. No scale. Only certainty that something in the world had tilted.
A fist hammered the far door.
Captain Dax pushed in, helm under his arm, sweat shining on his jaw. "Your Graces," he said low, "Apologies for my lack of manners, however the Crown's courier rode ahead of a troop. King's order: seize the newborn and exile it from birth 'for the peace of the realm.' They're already in the lower court. It seems what my lord and milady have feared has come to pass."
Claire closed her eyes. Marcus's hand found hers.
"How dare he. He has gone too far this time. That man is no longer any brother of mine!" Marcus yelled in outrage as he gripped Claire's exhausted hand. He couldn't stand to see the weariness in her eyes as she stared between her stillborn daughter, and her lively son crying in her arms. "Dax, Mara, stick to the plan. We didn't expect twins nor the death of one of them, but since it is our fate we'll improvise."
"We'll show them a child," Claire said suddenly, voice monotone. "And send a child away they cannot find."
Dax and the midwife named Mara didn't blink. They had served the Herringtons too long to argue with their intentions. "Which roads?" Mara asked quickly.
"Not roads," Claire said, already working out a plan in her head. "The river first. They'll reach Aguador and take the road from there on carriage."
They wrapped the still girl in linen white as moonlight. The living boy—warm and furious—quieted the moment his cheek brushed his sister's. Claire held them both, then kissed the boy's brow and breathed in the soft scent of him like a drowning woman finding air.
"Cariad," she said. The word meant beloved. "And for the census you'll be Caliad until it's safe."
Dax brought a wicker fisherman's creel lined in wool. Claire laid the boy within; he blinked up at the lamplight as if listening for something that wasn't there. Like a doctor trying to find a heartbeat or a pulse.
Affinity for protection blossomed — strangers feel safer at your side.
Mara swore herself to secrecy with a hand on the cradle and the other on her own throat. "I'll carry him," she said. "I know every postern between here and the water stairs." She took the creel and, before anyone could see her weep, pulled up her hood.
Footfalls in the hall. The palace steward arrived with a small, carved box: Claire's letter sealed in blue wax, a locket with a pressed sprig of river-mint, and a token of House Herrington—a lantern etched on copper. "For the orphan-mistress," he said. "On the Eastern Coast."
"Harborlight Orphanage," Claire whispered. "Five towns east. The one that never turns away a child."
Dax cracked the window shutters. Evening air came in smelling of river silt and yeast. He nodded once. "Go."
Mara vanished into the service corridor. Dax gave her three counts, then wiped his face with a towel, straightened his tunic, and opened the great door to the receiving chamber. He could already hear the approaching footsteps.
The King's soldiers entered like a rumor made flesh—polished, bored, sure of their errand. Their captain read the writ without looking up. "By royal decree, the newborn of Herrington is to be—"
Marcus stepped aside and gestured to the small white bundle in the midwife's arms. "The newborn of Herrington," he said, "is dead."
Silence. The captain's mouth worked, then closed. He approached, lifted a corner of linen, and saw a face that would not wake. He flinched despite himself and covered her again.
"Accept our condolences," Marcus said, and for once no emotion lived inside the words as he stood straight as an arrow.
"You may tell His Majesty the realm is at peace." Claire said from the bed as she stared out the window in silence.
Their tones were laced with a sarcasm and rage that was cold, and calculated. The captain swallowed at the chilling tone of the Duke and Duchess, nodded, and left with the failure of a man who had expected triumph but was only met with the searing guilt of compromising his own morals for coin. His men filed after him, their armor chafing like guilt as well.
Only when hoofbeats faded did Marcus let his shoulders sag. Dax as well let out a relieved sigh.
Claire however trembled, as the floodgates she had placed in front of the wave of emotions ravaging her heart crumbled with the tension of the moment. The stress of labor, the grief of losing her first two children before even being able to feed them. And so she wept, and the skies began to release tears of their own over the city of Ashguard as Duke Herrington wrapped his loving arms around his wife, and they wept together over the stillborn body of their daughter.
The streets mirrored the gloomy skies as news of the death of the beloved Herrington families child reached every corner. Almost as if spread on purpose.
—
Mara moved like a shadow through the bones of Ashguard as the cold rain drops pierced her pores and left their chilling shadow lingering. Down through laundry tunnels, across the warm backs of bakery ovens, along the water stairs where drips counted time. The creel rode against her ribs; sometimes the baby, temporarily named Caliad, made a small sound and the torchlight seemed to thicken, as if the air itself wished to be gentle. However, she did not stop. She knew she could not. She could not fail the Herrington's.d
Shortly she arrived at the boathouse, an old bargeman named Fen was waiting—the kind of man who had never asked a question in his life that he didn't need to ask, didn't find the need to ask. He pushed off without a word. The river took them like a hand takes a secret. Every once in a while looking back and checking their surroundings.
"Eastern run?" he murmured after a while, seeming to relax a bit.
"Harborlight," Mara said. "By dawn if we can." A raspy grunt was all that followed.
__
They had now made it back onto land and entered the shore from a small port town on the way, named Aguador.
Cariad woke, frowned at the night, and then—noticed the rocking of the carriage due to the skittish dragging it along—he reached for the mule astonishing Mara who was holding him, as babies usually didn't gain mobility in their limbs until they were farther along. The lantern on the prow, shaken by wind and the rocking carriage, steadied. The barge's skittish mule stopped stamping and stood as if listening to a soft song, before proceeding down the dark road illuminated by the warm, yellow light of the flame dancing on the lanterns interior.
Fen's brows climbed toward his cap. "Huh." If one were to look at his face, you couldn't tell whether he was amused or amazed by the mule's behavior, or by the strengthened flame in the lantern shedding a much brighter light on the road.
Presence deepened — crowds hush when you raise your hand.
The voice once again made itself known, but only to one being. No one else noticed it, as it came and went.
They made the first town before midnight, the second by moonset, and slept by turns in the reeds beyond the third. At dawn the river widened into brackish shine, gulls marking the seam where fresh met salt. Nets hung like gray wings along the pilings. The air tasted of tin and tide.
Saltmere.
Mara carried the creel up the wharf, past stacks of lobster pots and a boy hammering bent nails straight. Harborlight Orphanage stood where the wind always found it: a long, weathered house with blue shutters and a bell rope that snagged gulls' laughter. The ocean crashed against rocks and washed the sand as it slid along the beach in the background. The warm air smelled of salt and a summer family visit to SeaWorld.
The door opened before she could knock. Mother Ysolde filled the frame—broad-shouldered, sea-scarred, hair pinned with the stubbornness of twenty winters.
"You've brought me tide-wrack or treasure," Ysolde said, which was her way of saying child.
"Treasure," Mara managed, and could not say more for a moment.
They went to the long table by the windows. Mara gave the creel and then the box and the copper lantern-token. Ysolde read the letter twice and set it down as if it might break through the wood.
"Caliad," she said softly to the boy. "You'll be Caliad here, and nothing you don't need to be."
Mara nodded approvingly before she kissed the child's brow, tasting salt and a sweetness she would remember whenever she boiled herbs for the rest of her life. "Tell him," she said, "when he's ready—not before."
Ysolde nodded. "We've a rule like that in this house."
The gulls shrieked; the bell line clacked. The boy blinked at the light and made the small, intent face of someone listening for a heartbeat that wouldn't answer. A look of understanding and comprehension he shouldn't yet have, sat behind his eyes as his brows scrunched at the empty feeling around him.
Mara left before she could fail to leave. Fen's barge pushed off, and the river took them back toward the city that had swallowed its grief and kept breathing.
—
Saltmere taught its own catechism. Nets. Knots. Weather. The rumor of fish far below.
Caliad walked at nine months on planks that stole the footing of grown men. He spoke early in words shaped by wind: rope, pull, hold, wait. When a storm sheared a mast and sent it careening toward a cluster of children, he raised a hand without thinking and the mast found an easier angle, the way a crowd changes shape when an exit opens.
Agility increased — your steps find certainty atop broken beams.
When a widow's skiff came back empty for the third week, he sat on the prow and frowned into the gray, and the fish found her net as if they'd remembered a promise. When fever took a row of cots in winter, he carried water and peeled apples and somehow the worst nights passed with everyone still breathing come morning.
Nobody called it miracle. Saltmere had no room for big words. They called it luck and went on, and the boy went on with them. He never once expected to be acknowledged or appreciated for his actions.
At night, when the tide breathed in its sleep and the orphanage rafters ticked, Ysolde would find him at the window, looking east.
"Counting stars?" she'd ask.
"Listening," he'd say.
"For what?"
"For people," he'd answer, because to him that was the same as saying for the world.
And far inland, in a palace he could not yet remember, a little white cradle kept its moonlight, and a city made of copper roofs and lanterns waited for the boy it had already begun to love.